For months, governments around the world have been sorting through the economic devastation caused by of the Coronavirus Pandemic, putting in measures in an attempt to spur a U-shaped recovery, and avoid what seems to be an inevitable K-shaped one. But there’s another, more sinister U that has been growing for decades, one that is not a sign of a healthy economy.

In the early 2000s, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez used a century’s worth of data to visualize income and wealth inequality over time. Their findings validated a sense of injustice what many had been experiencing: by 2013 the top 0.1% were collecting over 10% of the nation’s income. The top 10% earned 50% of the nation’s income. After a period of compression and growth of the middle class that began in the 1940s—due in part to the New Deal, financial regulation, progressive taxation, and World War II—modern American society had reverted to the way it had looked in the age of robber barons and monopoly tycoons. …

To help match the unemployed with employment opportunities in the depths of the Great Depression, Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, worked to pass The Wagner-Peyser Act of 1933, creating Employment Service field offices across the country. After recognizing the value of the employment data collected in those offices, the field sites were later mobilized into the Occupational Analysis (OA) Program, a systematic effort to define every occupation in the United States. In 1939, they published their findings in the first edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT).

The same way that every English word is in the Oxford Dictionary, the DOT worked to define, categorize, and sort every job, publishing four editions between 1939 and 1991. In its first edition, this ambitious project cataloged over 17,500 occupations within 550 occupational groups. …

Every job has been impacted by the pandemic. Millions have become unemployed and many others have seen the very nature of their work change dramatically. It has revealed social and economic vulnerabilities in the United States that have been persisting under the surface for far too long.

This means that we’re at an inflection point — a chance to rewrite the rules and reset the values that are imbued into our system. …

It can be all too easy to visit a country and focus on the visible: how people dress, the price of food, the different social norms. But it’s what people do for a living, and the challenges that they face in earning that living, where you can really understand a country’s story.

Being a foreigner living in Malaysia for the last 8 months, it surprised me how little I actually knew about the workforce dynamics and labor history. …

During the last few months of 2017 I was in a constant state of outrage. I woke up every morning terrified of the next inevitable crisis, exhausted from putting out fires. I was tired of wasting my breath shouting into a digital void, asking for recognition of the problems that were escalating every day.

The startup I was working at was a few months from shutting down, and at this point it was too late to turn things around. Looking back, I don’t think we would have made it in the long-term, but what I do believe with certainty is that organizational distance played a role in ensuring that failure. …

One of the most fascinating quirks of human psychology is our reluctance to change our course of action. We commit to jobs, relationships, investments and social activities with a limited set of information, and then go about the process of reconciling our expectations with our lived experience, often rationalizing any shortcomings along the way. We endure a painful job because that promotion is just around the corner. We hold onto a sinking stock because we would kick ourselves for selling it right before it turns around.

This tendency to prefer our current state is called the status quo bias. It feels a bit like being on a train that might not be taking you to your destination, but instead of getting off, you decide you’d rather ride it out. …

In an ideal world, the amount that you see on your paycheck is an accurate reflection of the value that your productive work creates for your employer. But wages aren’t set in a vacuum — the amount you earn is affected by everything from how long you’ve been with the company, to the degree you hold (or don’t hold), whether you’re represented by a union, among others. And of course, your ability to bargain.

Now, when I say bargain, I don’t actually mean how persuasive you can be in that prototypical salary negotiation conversation where you’re sitting across from your to-be employer, dressed in a nice suit, making a case for why you should earn $XX wages as a starting salary. …

Whether you ascribe to the idea that we’re in the Second Machine Age or entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, you cannot deny that the world around us is changing at a dizzying pace. Just looking at the products demoed at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), you’ll learn about AI enabled mirrors or wearable brainwave devices that can improve your focus. So with all this new technology, why is economic productivity actually slowing down?

Before we can begin to answer that question, we need to abandon all of our assumptions around the concept of productivity. By learning more about what productivity actually means and how it is measured, we might have a chance of starting to understand the larger social questions. …